They were looking for mental health care. Instead, they drowned in a sheriff's van.

The family stayed together, moving as a unit. Ms. Green also suffered from physical ailments, some of which caused epileptic seizures. She loved working with children but worried about the fact that she could hold a child when a crisis occurred. She also did not want to drive, given the dangers to herself and others if she had to crash while driving.

Mrs. Green got married and divorced and she had four children – two daughters, Rose and Erica, and two boys, Gad, who is now in kindergarten and Otto, who died three years ago from bone cancer. He was 7 years old.

Everyone lived in the house in Myrtle Beach: Mrs. Green, her parents and children, all taking care of each other. "It was a kind of symbiotic, I guess," said Ms. Green-Johnson.

When Hurricane Florence arrived, they separated: Erica, 17, took her grandfather to the inland so as not to lose the electricity needed for his oxygen machine; Gad and his grandmother joined Donnela at home; Rose and Nikki stayed together. The medication she had recently started taking for her schizophrenia seemed to work, "opened your eyes," said Mrs. Green-Johnson, making this period even richer.

"They organized a hurricane party, both," she said. "They were really reconnecting, getting closer a lot than they had been."

On Sunday, after the storm, the family had been reunited. Monday, things were back to normal. On Tuesday, Mrs. Green had her counseling appointment. And that night, Mrs. Green's sister heard that a van had disappeared into the water.